Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday September 18, 2006 @10:15AM
from the lookit-all-them-words-not-there dept.

CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects.
In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.

Can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium that don't match up with the rest of the civilized world. I got C&D from a Belgian company through a law firm in New York. The Belgian company claims to own the copyright to my vacation photos (with me standing in them!). The law firm (acting on behalf of the Belgians) demanded I take them off my web site or they'd sue me into oblivion.

I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.

can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium

Yeah, one stupid company and the whole country should be avoided. Expert advice, Wayne!

This is quite a sensible decision by the belgian court, I think. Several newspapers offer the news
of today for free on their websites, and let you pay for searching the archives.
Google caches those pages and offers them for free with their own ads added. Plain and simple copyright
violation, no arguing around it. But quite convenient of course...

First of all, Google News doesn't have ANY ads, mainly because of concerns over copyright that you mentioned. Secondly, Google Web Search only displays its ads in its search listings, NOT when you view the cached page. And most competent webmasters know that if they don't want their content cached by Google, they can just edit their robots.txt file to exclude themselves from being cached, or even indexed.

Someone "out there" is taking the piss, right? I once visited Belgium for three weeks and it became apparent quite quickly that there wasn't anything news-worthy going on. All they seem to have is really, really excellent beer.

It's not about the whole world reading about what's new in Belgium: it's more about people from Belgium reading news about their own country or getting international news served by their own papers/news sites.

100% of my income comes from (google) ads. ANY source of traffic is presious and those newspapers will feel the lack of that extra money. To me, all those stories about newspapers demanding money form G always sounded like extortion. Something like "if you won't give me half of your lunch, I will

I am more concerned with the over inclusion of "news" sites. The news feature on Google has been flooeded with blogs and other "new" media sources. I enjoy reading blogs, but they are often so scewed to the blogger's opinion that they need some additional context. I realize that mainstream media is often accused of bias as well, but at least I know who those stations are. The news feature is useless to me if I need to get past 200 blogs to find one legitimate source.

Maybe they could create a feature to sort by mainstream media and all other sources. However, I like having all available sources show up because you get to see news stories develop for months sometimes before the mainstream media reports anything on it.

The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.

Bingo. If " one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own." is accuarate, they failed to avail themselves of the quick, easy, and cheap solution. Obviously, that's not what it really was about.

I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.

they failed to avail themselves of the quick, easy, and cheap solution.

Why should they be forced to do anything? Google should use its awesome psychic powahs to automatically determine that when they put out information for the whole world to read, they don't actually want the whole world to read it. Or remember that it ever existed once it's gone.

I think you missed the point of the comment.The newspaper is upset with Google because they link to their site without sharing in any of the profit the make through advertising; but google links to everyone's site without sharing any advertizing and if everyone reacted the same way these newspapers did it would become impossible to search the internet for anything.

Anyways...

Like most people (I imagine) I rarely remember the address of sites I wish to visit and usually google for them; now that these papers

As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians. Nice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.

Maybe its the start of something, all really dull places will sue to have their very dull news removed. After all, if something interesting happens there then one of the majors will cover it.

ice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.

Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official. I've always viewed it as sort of a hub, where influential Europeans meet to make decisions. But, I've never been there, so maybe my perspective is skewed.

Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official.

The original headquarters of NATO was Paris, but it was moved to Brussels after DeGaulle began to withdraw French forces from the NATO command structure to spite the US and UK. This is only a guess, b

Erasmus: Actually, wikipedia seems to indicate he is from the Netherlands. He is considered Dutch, which last I checked is generally considered Netherlands.
Descartes: If you are talking about Rene Descartes, he was French.
Van Dyck: Score, you 1, me 2.
Lemaitre: You tied the score...good job.
Spaak: I really should deduct points for you not knowing how to spell his name.
Mercator: Can I deduct you two here? Nicholas was born in France and did work across Europe including Netherlands, again not Belgium.

I'm sure the Belgians will have heard of those people. And equally I'm sure you can name some people who will be famous in the US but draw a complete blank elsewhere - sure, it's disproportionate because of Hollywood and the fact that the US presidents tend to make as many waves as possible when abroad, but if you're going to be talking about the rest of the world you should probably remember that the US is not "most people".

Using the same logic as described here, I could probably sue Google for some GPL violations.

Some web sites incorrectly send all their contents as text/plain or text/html, including binary files, images, etc. It looks like Google tries to automatically correct this, but is not always successful (this may depend on the amount of plain text contained in the binary file). Anyway, regardless of the reason why it happens, it seems to be possible to find a few binary files in the Google cache (not easy, but po

The GPL isn't quite so assholic as that. They don't necessarily have to give out the source themselves. They simply have to either make the source available at no extra charge or tell people where you can get it (though, this third party source must provide it for free and the source must be the same as you used for your binary). This is why it's quite common for people to put up patches and tell people to get the standard tarball and patch it (see udpcast for an example concerning busybox). When's the last

What does "As can be seen by doing a search" mean? When I click the link I see lots of results from the site - I assumed that there were no results to be expected. Don't tell me the newspapers caved in so early...

Many newspapers do keep content around online. I guess the fact that these people don't, and then go on to sue what is probably the most popular websites that links to their own sites, speaks volumes about their grasp of economics. They must be stuck in the belief that if someone else benefits, you must somehow lose...

Well, many (such as the New York Times) have recent content online openly, then move it to an archive that you must pay to access later. In that case, they would certainly be upset if google was mirroring their content later.

by the European court. Heck, it violates freedom of speech in essence. And, more importantly, linking/quoting has been proven to be not illegal in previous cases in the EU. Either they are all wrong, or the belgians are wrong. In my case, I come from the Netherlands, we know the answer;=)

The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?

If the Belgian newspapers had designed their site correctly by including the meta tags from the very beginning; there would have been no lawsuit. Since they didn't; Google is right to make them suffer by de-listing them entirely.

I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt

I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt

The point is that copyright owners still have a right to exert control over their copyrights; whether or not they use a robots.txt file. Searching and displaying

Of course they have a right to exert control over it. But as a standard, most places would like their content indexed (how much work would it take to have an opt-in for every subdirectory on a site where content may belong to different authors?).If they don't, as has happened, they stated "We do not want Google to index our pages without paying us lots of money, as google make money off the indexing and finding", and Google promptly took them out of the News and Search.Now, they have exactly what they asked for. Google will make nothing from them.However, as always happens, they didn't actually stop to think what this would REALLY mean. They called Google's bluff, expecting to make a lot of money from the deal. Google didn't bluff and said "Ok then, you're on your own".Now, they're on their own, and will definitely lose the ongoing money obtained through the search engine hits Google provided to them (gratis, and subsidised only by their own index adverts on the way there. Everybody pays for PR after all).

Now, if things change to the point that all sites need to have something to opt in, on a per directory basis (otherwise you end up with a clash), or even per file (for the same reasons), the whole concept of indexing the web becomes impossible, or at least vastly more difficult. For example, you'd need to stamp a file that you wanted indexed using extensions to existing HTML, or in meta fields. And as a goodly many people who put pages up want them indexed, and use tools, then the tools will soon start having defaults of the 'index me' stamp. And then we're back to square one with more traffic being used uselessly.So, you can either choose the opt out (and get free advertising into the bargain), and opt out where you wish, or choose a way that breaks the whole model for everyone.

If I understand this correctly, the principal problem is not Google News but rather Google Cache. It seems that when news articles move from public to subscriber-only, Google retrieved the contents from its cache, instead of removing the article. So the issue was that Google was distributing articles instead of only linking them.

This is in no way Google's fault. Google caches sites, the Internet archive [archive.org] caches sites, its up to you as a webmaster to put limits on it with the well-publicized "robots.txt" restrictions available to you.

hmm, reading further in the thread, apparently my lack of knowledge of the syntax of robots.txt is only matched by my willingness to make a fool of myself. If indeed NOCACHE is an option, and respected by Google, then these Belgians are stupid to go to court for something that has an easy technological fix and the court is stupid to allow this.

In my experience, Google no longer caches websites that haven't been indexable in some time. That is to say, if you remove the page or even better -- replace it with an empty one that links to an excluded page, Google should (and most likely will) remove the cache of the originally indexed page. I'd expect this to happen within a month or so (from my experience).

You mean I can't read earth-shattering news exclusively put on french-speaking,.be domains anymore? Whatever will we do now? Dear Jesus.. how will I survive when such a huge part of the internets has been torn away? How many tubes are left, oh harsh harsh world?In all seriousness, I didn't know the french-speaking press of the Belgian world was so damn stupid. Most of their traffic probably comes from people accidentally clicking on links from google. Why would they do this? Money?

First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try!
If you read the complete text there are several important points :
- first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves,
this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?)
- your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to
be opt-in.
- all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just
types the newspaper name, followed by.be
- the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They
did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info,
re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them.
This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992)
in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases
between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge
of those who are "databased"..
For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed.
(although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database")
As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..),
but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit.
(where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals)
Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news".
But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be
For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked
Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that.
In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times,
Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache

If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is.be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.

Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".

I sometimes wonder about the average/.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

And I sometimes wonder about the average/.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.

Yeah that whoosh sound should have been a dead giveaway, but apparently not. Thanks for clarifying my post though. I too thought someone with a.be address should have known that Belgian is not a language, but alas...

Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes?;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!

I sometimes wonder about the average/.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

I hate to tell you this, but Belgium is not a major country. Do you happen to know what languages are commonly spoken in Zaire or Kenya? Or what the different ethnicities of the people in Chile are? What languages are commonly spoken in India (all of them, please)? What are the common languages spoken in Liechtenstein and Monaco? These questions are akin to asking what languages are common in Belgium.

By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average/.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.

Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.

There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is... complicated, politically.

But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.

The problem was that the newssite of French and German speaking Belgium had articles indexed by google (I believe it's about Le Soir [lesoir.be]), and that didn't pose any problem.

They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)

The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.

The link to the article on vrtnieuws [vrtnieuws.net] as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.

Yes, but the poster makes an important point. google.be is blocking the sites, but google.com is not. google.fr is not either.

It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or.fr instead. It would be different if Google were removing lesoir.be and other sites from all searches (including google.com searches) by computers with Belgian IP addresses, but are they? If not, Belgians will probably switch to google.fr/.com rather than MSN.

I don't know why they did this for.be. Could it be because.be servers are actually in Belgium, and thus are somehow legally affected? That's the only way I can think of that this block makes sense.

I don't see google doing this to be spiteful. If these papers are suing for reproducing their content, google is covering its arse by not repeating that offense by returning search results with an extract of the page. If google removed results unilaterally, of any site, for any reason, there would go their credibility.

Well, ther really is no monopoly here. And the barrier of switching to some other search-engine is very low, so it's not like Google could force anyone to use their service. And like it or not, Google is under no obligation to serve those newspapers. Apparently they don't want to work with Google, so why should Google work for them?

This is not entirely clear, but it seems Google is abusing their near monopoly on search to strong arm their position in a new market of News.

The last numbers I saw placed Google as having about 45% of the search market. That isn't even in the running for being a monopoly.

Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.

As far as I can tell, there is no way in which this ruling applies to news.google.com that does not apply equally to google.com search. If one is ruled illegal by the courts, the other is probably just as illegal, so it makes sense to remove them from both.

I really thing Google should be allowed to link any news together in a news service, but escalating the issue to searching is really abusive and something I am quite sure they will be punished for in Europe. (Besides the obvious fact that it IS EVIL).

If Google had a monopoly, this could be an antitrust issue, but I've seen no evidence of that. There are a lot of players in the search market and Google has instituted absolutely no lock-in of any kind. Nothing stops Belgians from moving to something else, aside from the fact that the others tend to be lower quality. I don't foresee any antitrust action against them for this, nor any grounds for it. Since they don't wield monopoly influence in the market, I don't see how this is "evil."

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of
1,000,000.- per day of delay;

All sites, not just news. It seems that the news site wants to punish itself.

From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.

In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.

Google just got sued by these guys for indexing their site. When you lose a lawsuit with ignorant assholes (i.e. anyone running a business on the web who doesn't use robots.txt and then complains about being indexed), the safest thing to do is make completely sure there's nothing left by which they can leverage that lawsuit into something like a contempt complaint.

Of course, not being indexed by Google can apparently be the basis for a lawsuit, too. Damned if you do...

Neither does Microsoft on operating system. Yet their market share is significant enough that they have to obey monopoly rules.

Antitrust law is built around whether or not a company wields monopoly influence on a market. Many of the laws use 70% as the point at which such an influence should be investigated. Windows has something like 90% of the desktop market, and there are significant barriers to entry. Their monopoly influence is easily demonstrated by pricing that does not follow the curve of a free

I believe they were only required to remove links from Google News, but for whatever reasons they decided to effectively eradicate the site from Google completely. Read into that what you will.

So you believe Google indexing has some value to this newspaper, yet they paid exactly nothing to Google for this service. It seems to me they have absolutely no claim. If I'm receiving free electricity but complain to the power company about the power lines on my property, I can't very well complain if they cut me of

"Would those have strawberries, whipped cream, and blueberries?I want some."

The diner a block from me makes them that way in the vague shape of the US flag.

I'm not kidding.

And yes, they _are_ yummy.

To make this on topic, Google directs viewers at the Belgian newspapers, and the Belgian newspapers are then able to extract yet more money from their advertisers. I think to make a point, the other search engines should also boycott Belgian newspapers, because no good can come of this if this sets a precedent.